Yesterday afternoon, I watched "Breakfast at Tiffany's," where Audrey Hepburn is Givenchy-clad, heart-breakingly lovely and impossibly sad and naive Holly Golightly, Truman Capote's eccentric heroine struggling to come to terms with herself. Henry Mancini's music was wistfully (I think I'm going through an "adverb phase") beautiful. The ending deviates from the book, but we wouldn't have had it any other way in this romantic, feel-good movie.

I do remember shedding more than a few tears when I read the book, though.

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A few hours ago, I stared, bewildered, at the screen as the credits of Charlie Kaufman's and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation" rolled (or did they blink? I have to say I don't remember). I was, like, "what the hell was that?" Kaufman's movies, I have observed, have that effect on me: bewilderment comes first, then, an enlightenment of sorts, where I go "ah, so that was what it was." In this case, I mulled over the movie for a good long stretch of minutes, my mind turning, doing cartwheels, then settling.

In "Adaptation," Kaufman goes into meta-fiction mode, depicting the dilemma most writers (screenwriters, specifically) go through in their craft.

I was pretty settled into the movie and then, boom! I was jolted into puzzlement and wonder when, from a sad writer from The New Yorker, Susan Orlean suddenly becomes a drug-addicted, severely depressed woman with tendencies for murder. Then there's death all over the place, with John Laroche dying from a crocodile attack (how dreadfully cliche, but that was exactly the point).

To think that it was all orchids and sadness and a writer's anxieties over his balding head, his pot-belly and his desperation resulting from digging his heels at the kind of screenplay he wanted to write when the film began. The turning point came when Kaufman attended a seminar on screenplay writing, where he got yelled at for even suggesting that there wasn't enough drama in the world (or in the book he was trying to translate into film, for that matter).

Etc, etc.

Incidentally, I read a review where the writer criticized the film for going "haywire" after the first half. I think he didn't get the point Kaufman was trying to make. Isn't that sad?

Like the rest of the Kaufman movies I've seen, needless to say, "Adaptation" was brilliant (this adjective always comes to mind when I hear the name Charlie Kaufman). He is just sheer genius and talent. His movies make me think (understatement here).

And now I'm just plain exhausted.

Time to stop this nonsense, hit the mattress and curl up into a dreamless slumber.

Provided I stop thinking about Kaufman's madness, that is.